e the additional trouble to learn half a
dozen quotations, without understanding them, and admit the
superiority of Shakspeare without further demur. Nothing, perhaps,
can more completely demonstrate the total ignorance of the public of
all that is great or valuable in Shakspeare than their universal
admiration of Maclise's Hamlet.

The process is impossible when there is in the work nothing to
attract and something to disgust the vulgar mind. Neither their
intrinsic excellence, nor the authority of those who can judge of
it, will ever make the poems of Wordsworth or George Herbert
popular, in the sense in which Scott and Byron are popular, because
it is to the vulgar a labor instead of a pleasure to read them; and
there are parts in them which to such judges cannot but be vapid or
ridiculous. Most works of the highest art,--those of Raffaelle, M.
Angelo, or Da Vinci,--stand as Shakspeare does,--that which is
commonplace and feeble in their excellence being taken for its
essence by the uneducated, imagination assisting the impression,
(for we readily fancy that we feel, when feeling is a matter of
pride or conscience,) and affectation and pretension increasing the
noise of the rapture, if not its degree. Giotto, Orgagna, Angelico,
Perugino, stand, like George Herbert, only with the few. Wilkie
becomes popular, like Scott, because he touches passions which all
feel, and expresses truths which all can recognize.

CHAPTER II.

DEFINITION OF GREATNESS IN ART.

Sec. 1. Distinction between the painter's intellectual power and technical
knowledge.

In the 15th Lecture of Sir Joshua Reynolds, incidental notice is taken
of the distinction between those excellences in the painter which belong
to him _as such_, and those which belong to him in common with all men
of intellect, the general and exalted powers of which art is the
evidence and expression, not the subject. But the distinction is not
there dwelt upon as it should be, for it is owing to the slight
attention ordinarily paid to it, that criticism is open to every form of
coxcombry, and liable to every phase of error. It is a distinction on
which depend all sound judgment of the rank of the artist, and all just
appreciation of the dignity of art.

Sec. 2. Painting, as such, is nothing more than language.

Pa